The U.S. dollar’s downward slide is accelerating as low interest rates, inflation concerns and the massive federal budget deficit undermine the currency.

With no relief in sight for the dollar on any of those fronts, the downward pressure on the dollar is widely expected to continue.
The dollar fell nearly 1% against a broad basket of currencies this week, following a drop of similar size last week. The ICE U.S. Dollar Index closed at its lowest level since August 2008, before the financial crisis intensified.

“The dollar just hasn’t had anything positive going for it,” said Alessio de Longis, who oversees the Oppenheimer Currency Opportunities Fund.

The main driver for the dollar’s decline is low interest rates in the U.S. compared with higher and rising rates abroad. Lower rates mean a lower return on cash—and the pressure from that factor could intensify next week when the Federal Reserve’s rate-setting committee is expected to signal that U.S. short-term rates will likely remain near zero for many months to come. On Wednesday, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is scheduled to give the central bank’s first-ever press conference following a policy-setting meeting.

But it is worry about the U.S. budget deficit that is intensifying the selloff. On Monday, investors were spooked by a warning from Standard & Poor’s that it might take away the U.S. government’s coveted AAA rating status amid concerns the Obama administration and Republicans in Congress might not be able to agree to significant reductions in the deficit.

In addition, Chinese government officials have stepped up rhetoric hinting they might diversify their $3 trillion of currency reserves away from U.S. dollars. Such a shift would chip away at what has been a substantial source of dollar-buying in recent years.

I dare say that the Wall Street Journal got it wrong this time. While it certainly might be technically true that the immediate driver of the dollar’s decline is ” is low interest rates in the U.S. compared with higher and rising rates abroad,” that is only a symptom of the ultimate cause of the dollar’s decline. The bigger picture can be summed up in two words: quantitative easing. Obama’s Federal Reserve is creating money out of thin air. And with more dollars chasing the same amount (and actually fewer) finite goods and services, the value of each dollar devalues.

A week is a long time in Obama’s God damn America. A fool-in-chief can do a lot of damage in a week:

NEW YORK—Investors wasted no time in sending the dollar to new three-year lows after the Federal Reserve gave them little reason to support it.

Weak U.S. growth and unemployment data quickened the dollar’s fall. Initial employment claims jumped back above the 400,000 level in the latest week. Meanwhile, gross domestic product data showed that economic growth slowed sharply in the first quarter, led by surging food and energy costs that sent a key gauge of inflation, the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index, soaring to its highest level in nearly three years.

Late Thursday, the euro was at $1.4821 from $1.4794 late Wednesday. The dollar traded at ¥81.54 from ¥82.04, while the euro was at ¥120.85 from ¥121.37. The U.K. pound bought $1.6640 from $1.6636. The dollar fetched 0.8733 Swiss franc from 0.8738 franc, plunging to a new record low.

The ICE Dollar Index, which tracks the U.S. dollar against a trade-weighted basket of currencies, was at 73.12 from 73.519, its lowest level since July 2008.

Has Obama made our economy better? Really? You’ve been watching and reading mainstream media propagandist lies, haven’t you? Here’s the reality: our dollar situation is every bit as bad now as it was when the terrible economic implosion of 2008 hit us. That giant sucking sound you hear all around you is the value and purchasing power of your dollar sinking into the abyss.

Here’s another major economic indicator going right down the toilet:

Home price gains since spring 2009 vanishThe Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index for 20 major U.S. cities in February comes close to its previous bottom reached in April 2009.
By Alejandro Lazo, Los Angeles Times
April 26, 2011, 5:06 p.m.

The home price gains made after the housing market bottomed in spring 2009 have vanished, with 10 cities posting fresh lows in February, according to a closely watched index that tracks home prices in America’s biggest metropolitan areas.

The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index for 20 major U.S. cities, released Tuesday, came within a hair of its previous bottom hit in April 2009. The renewed drop in home prices indicates the nation’s housing woes continue despite a recovery in the broader economy.

“There is very little, if any, good news about housing. Prices continue to weaken, while trends in sales and construction are disappointing,” said David M. Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at Standard & Poor’s.

[…]

Foreclosures remain a significant part of the market and probably will remain so for the foreseeable future as borrowers continue to fall behind on their mortgage payments.

Patrick Newport, U.S. economist for consultancy IHS Global Insight, wrote in a note Tuesday that the decline in the index and drops in other home price measures — specifically a monthly index produced by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which has seen steady declines in recent months — indicate that the housing slump is once again widespread.

The federal agency’s index’s “recent decline indicates that the vicious cycle in which falling prices lead to more foreclosures which lead to even lower housing prices, continues to play a role in keeping housing on the mat,” Newport wrote.

The Case-Shiller index has fallen to nearly the same level it was in April 2009, the last time it bottomed, evaporating the gains made last year after a popular tax credit for buyers fueled sales nationally. Experts predict prices will continue to fall this year, pushing past their previous lows into a much-feared double dip.

The only thing propping up the economy under Obama’s morally and fiscally idiotic policies is QE2. Banks and major businesses are not being allowed to fail (it’s all too big too fail in an increasingly fascist system in which the government dominates the banking and corporate spheres). Right now, the system Obama has only made more broken is being kept afloat in cash being created out of thin air. The last time quantitative easing ended, the DOW immediately lost 16% of its value in two weeks. And QE2 is set to end in June.

This means QE3, and then of course QE4. Because “QE” means “Quack Economics” far more than it should mean anything else.

The following video WAS a fictional account warning us of what could happen. But it is about to become news before history confirms it:

And do I really have to say anything about gas prices? Gas was $1.79 a gallon when Obama took office; it is now $3.91 and going up every single day. That is an increase of more than 118%. How’s that hope n’ change workin’ out for ya?

Liberals say they care about the poor. But they don’t give a damn about the poor. All Democrats want is to “fundamentally transform” America into a socialistic system where they can maintain power forever.

I think of one journalist named Stephen Laurent who was impriosoned for trying to tell the truth about Hitler. He wrote:

“I am writing this from cell 24. Outside a new Germany is being created. Many millions are rejoicing. Hitler is promising everyone precisely what they want. I think when they wake to their sobering senses, they will find they have been led by the nose and duped by lies.”

And that is where America is heading. Only there will be no America to rebuild America the way the United States of America rebuilt Germany in the aftermath of Germany reaping its whirlwind after sowing the wind. Obama himself will have seen to that.

The funniest thing about this – if anything about America turning into a socialist banana republic is “funny” – is that it will be the left who so rabidly despise the Word of God (otherwise known as the Holy Bible) who will bring about it’s ultimate fulfillment.

The beast is coming. He will be a one-world global leader who will take over in the catastrophic aftermath of false messiahs like Barack Hussein Obama. He will be the personification of the United Nations and globalism and a world without borders and all the other total idiocy the left has been jabbering about for decades. He will represent the sum total of everything the liberals have ever yearned for.

The secular humanist left has said that if they could just take over, they would create a humanist Utopia. God is going to give them their chance in the Tribulation with the big government Utopia of the Antichrist.

And in just seven years he will have brought a literal hell on earth.

It will be the left – it will be the people who most hate and despise and mock the Bible – that brings about all of the end times prophecies of the very Bible they so ridicule.

Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount – a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let’s read our Bibles. Folks haven’t been reading their Bibles.

But I have been reading my Bible, President Obama. And I’m seeing more and more reasons to believe it and accept it as God’s Word about a time which is now at hand.

I see the dollar devaluing to nothing; I see the cost of food skyrocketing. And I consider the words of the book of Revelation:

“He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name” (Revelation 13:16-17)

Obama has appointed another far leftist radical to join the ranks of such as committed socialist Carol Browner (Global Warming czar) and committed globalist Harold Koh (State Department’s legal adviser). Now it’s Rosa Brooks, the far-left columnist for the Los Angeles Times who has said:

“George W. Bush and Dick Cheney shouldn’t be treated like criminals who deserve punishment. They should be treated like psychotics who need treatment.”

This is a committed globalist – which by definition means she calls for a diminution of American power and the American Constitution – who has served on the incredibly radical George Soros organization.

I hope none of you leftists mind if Ann Coulter goes to work in the next Republican administration. Maybe in some powerful capacity where she can just run hog wild all over you.

Influential Los Angeles Times columnist Rosa Brooks has hung up her journalistic hat and joined the Obama administration, but not before penning a public proposal calling for some radical ideas to help bail out the failing news industry.

Brooks, who has taken up a post as an adviser at the Pentagon, advocated upping “direct government support for public media” and creating licenses to govern news operations.

“Years of foolish policies have left us with a choice: We can bail out journalism, using tax dollars and granting licenses in ways that encourage robust and independent reporting and commentary, or we can watch, wringing our hands, as more and more top journalists are laid off,” she wrote in her parting column on April 9.

Brooks said this would help rescue the industry from a “death spiral” and left the government unaccountable to the journalists who must keep it honest. “[I] can’t imagine anything more dangerous than a society in which the news industry has more or less collapsed,” she wrote.

But critics say her proposal would spell an end to the independent media and make journalists reliant lapdogs.

“The day that the government gets involved in the news media you see the end of the democratic process, because an independent news media is absolutely essential to the success of a democracy,” said L. Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog group.

Bozell said licensing journalists would violate American traditions and was a form of “intellectual prostitution.”

“Since when did our Founding Fathers envision that … you could exercise your right to freedom of speech provided you had a license from the federal government? This is the kind of stuff you have revolutions about,” he told FOXNews.com.

Attempts to reach Brooks by phone and e-mail were unsuccessful. A columnist for four years at the Times, Brooks this week joined the office of the undersecretary of Defense for policy, the principal adviser to the Pentagon’s top brass. She retains her post as a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and during the Clinton administration served as a senior adviser to the State Department….

It is unclear whether the Obama administration is considering such assistance. A spokesman for Obama did not respond to questions about Brooks’ statements, which were published after her appointment to the Pentagon.

Some in the government are already looking to assist the industry. Sen. Benjamin Cardin, D-Md., proposed legislation in March that would allow newspapers to operate as tax-exempt nonprofits as long as they don’t endorse political candidates. The move was heralded as a positive step toward finding a fix but condemned by critics for potentially making newspapers beholden to the government.

Some scribes are already closely bound to Washington. As jobs are axed and papers felled across the country, many journalists have sought work elsewhere. A number have gone to work for the Obama administration, including Chicago Tribune correspondent Jill Zuckman; Time magazine’s Washington bureau chief, Jay Carney; former L.A. Times reporter Peter Gosselin; and Warren Bass, once the Washington Post’s deputy editor.

Brooks is not the first journalist to support a broadsheet bailout, but she is the first member of the administration to publicly declare her support for the move, which appears to be gaining momentum.

We need a Ministry of Propaganda to go along with everything else this administration is doing.

Contrast what Obama’s new pick for his administration is calling for in relation to another liberal demand. The last third of one of my articles provides quote after quote from prominent Democrats calling for the re-imposition of the Fairness Doctrine. Most Americans recognize how fascist such a liberal attack on free speech would be, but Democrats will not be stopped: the outgoing FCC commissioner recently warned of a new “back-door” implementation of the Fairness Doctrine. And let’s not forget the central fact: the Fairness Doctrine – by any liberal euphemism – is a blatant attempt to muzzle the only media outlet in which conservatives truly have a substantial voice.

While these verminous hypocrites want to legislate highly successful talk-radio out of existence simply because they don’t like the message of the most successful talk radio hosts, they want to fund failed liberal media because they need to subsidize the leftist message coming out of the liberal-dominated mainstream media.

I’ve written about the fact that study after study has demonstrated that the media is dominated by liberalism. I’ve written about this in numerous articles, but one paragraph from a previous article should suffice to demonstrate that fact:

The bias, the ideology masquerading as news, the dishonesty and corruption of the media, is rampant. And more and more Americans simply no longer trust them.

I would love to subscribe to my local newspaper. I’d love to have the coupons and the local news coverage. But the local paper is more likely to offend me than it is to inform me. The moderate competitor from immediately outside the area stopped delivering to my neighborhood. So now I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal. It isn’t delivered to my area either, and I like a hard-copy newspaper; so I have to wait at my mailbox for the darn thing and read it the day after the fact. But it’s either that or no paper at all.

I don’t need a “vast rightwing conspiracy” newspaper; just don’t give me “General Betray Us.” But that’s just too damn much to expect from way too many newspapers and periodicals these days.

There just aren’t enough people left who trust these bird-cage liners to make them profitable.

The tea parties are a great example of this. Hundreds of thousands of people showed up to some 750 events across the nation. As Channel 2 local news reported, “There were thousands on hand for that event at noon.“ And that was in a small city. And there was still another event scheduled for the evening that was expected to be even better attended. And horns were honking so loud from passing motorists who couldn’t attend (but wished they could have) that you couldn’t hear yourself think. Yet how does the mainstream media handle this major news event? They mock it and seek to undermine it even as they refuse to actually report it. They are disenfranchising their readership to their own extinction.

But rather than begin to correct the far-left ideology-as-news and supply the market with fair and objective news sources, far-leftwingers such as Rosa Brooks – who is now part of the Obama administration – say that Nazi Germany’s Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda and the Soviet TASS were sound government-business relationships.

I keep calling these people fascists. And they keep saying, “We’re not quite fascist yet; but we’re working toward it as hard as we can.”

There are more slaves today than at any time in history. Yet blacks in America ignore that tragic reality and instead fiercely decry this country over its part in an institution that was ended – at great expense to whites – nearly 150 years ago. And even though it is Islam and Muslim countries that are the greatest perpetrators of black slavery on the planet, it is fashionable today to be black and Muslim. Barack Obama’s former pastor gave all kinds of accolades to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakan, and Obama himself attended Farrakan’s so-called “Million Man March.”

The people who so stridently blamed America for attacking Iraq stand silently – or even worse yet, actually defend – the Russian attack of Georgia.

These are just a couple of examples of the leftists in America and the world who routinely demonize the United States while pointedly turning their backs on shocking acts of evil being perpetrated by leftist regimes around the world.

As writer Victor Davis Hanson points out, it is forgotten that America is the model, not the villain. And when the United States wearies of the constant attacks and ceases to stand up for freedom in the world, you will see a reawakening of evil such as the world hasn’t witnessed since the 1930s.

Russia invades Georgia. China jails dissidents. China and India pollute at levels previously unimaginable. Gulf monarchies make trillions from jacked-up oil prices. Islamic terrorists keep car bombing. Meanwhile, Europe offers moral lectures, while Japan and South Korea shrug and watch — all in a globalized world that tunes into the Olympics each night from Beijing.

“Citizens of the world” were supposed to share, in relative harmony, our new “Planet Earth,” which was to have followed from an interconnected system of free trade, instantaneous electronic communications, civilized diplomacy and shared consumer capitalism.

But was that ever quite true?

In reality, to the extent globalism worked, it followed from three unspoken assumptions:

First, the U.S. economy would keep importing goods from abroad to drive international economic growth.

Second, the U.S. military would keep the sea-lanes open, and trade and travel protected. After the past destruction of fascism and global communism, the Americans, as global sheriff, would continue to deal with the occasional menace like a Muammar al-Gaddafi, Slobodan Milosevic, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-il or the Taliban.

Third, America would ignore ankle-biting allies and remain engaged with the world — like a good, nurturing mom who at times must put up with the petulance of dependent teenagers.

But there have been a number of indications recently that globalization may soon lose its American parent, who is tiring, both materially and psychologically.

The United States may be the most free, stable and meritocratic nation in the world, but its resources and patience are not unlimited. Currently, it pays more than a half trillion dollars per year to import $115-a-barrel oil that is often pumped at a cost of about $5.

The Chinese, Japanese and Europeans hold trillions of dollars in U.S. bonds — the result of massive trade deficits. The American dollar is at historic lows. We are piling up staggering national debt. Over 12 million live here illegally and freely transfer more than $50 billion annually to Mexico and Latin America.

Our military, after deposing Milosevic, the Taliban and Saddam, is tired. And Americans are increasingly becoming more sensitive to the cheap criticism of global moralists.

But as the United States turns ever so slightly inward, the new globalized world will revert to a far poorer — and more dangerous — place.

Liberals like presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama speak out against new free trade agreements and want existing accords like NAFTA readjusted. More and more Americans are furious at the costs of illegal immigration — and are moving to stop it. The foreign remittances that help prop up Mexico and Latin America are threatened by any change in America’s immigration attitude.

Meanwhile, the hypocrisy becomes harder to take. After all, it is easy for self-appointed global moralists to complain that terrorists don’t enjoy Miranda rights at Guantanamo, but it would be hard to do much about the Russian military invading Georgia’s democracy and bombing its cities.

Al Gore crisscrosses the country, pontificating about Americans’ carbon footprints. But he could do far better to fly to China to convince them not to open 500 new coal-burning power plants.

It has been chic to chant “No blood for oil” about Iraq’s petroleum — petroleum that, in fact, is now administered by a constitutional republic. But such sloganeering would be better directed at China’s sweetheart oil deals with Sudan that enable the mass murdering in Darfur.

Due to climbing prices and high government taxes, gasoline consumption is declining in the West, but its use is rising in other places, where it is either untaxed or subsidized.

So, what a richer but more critical world has forgotten is that in large part America was the model, not the villain — and that postwar globalization was always a form of engaged Americanization that enriched and protected billions.

Yet globalization, in all its manifestations, will run out of steam the moment we tire of fueling it, as the world returns instead to the mindset of the 1930s — with protectionist tariffs; weak, disarmed democracies; an isolationist America; predatory dictatorships; and a demoralized gloom-and-doom Western elite.

If America adopts the protectionist trade policies of Japan or China, global profits plummet. If our armed forces follow the European lead of demilitarization and inaction, rogue states advance. If we were to treat the environment as do China and India, the world would become quickly a lost cause.

If we flee Iraq and call off the war on terror, Islamic jihadists will regroup, not disband. And when the Russians attack the next democracy, they won’t listen to the United Nations, the European Union or Michael Moore.

Brace yourself — we may be on our way back to an old world, where the strong do as they will, and the weak suffer as they must.